Not Tinder, but...

Worldbuilding

(Originally posted on Facebook)

It suddenly occurred to me today that a supers smartphone app would solve so many problems in contacting other supers (this is distinct from "super Tinder" which I have also talked about).

Problem 1: What's it called?

The names I come up with seem very...quotidian. SuperTalk. ParaGraph or MetaGraph. The cutest so far is "App, App, and Away".

I'm thinking of an app that does the following (or says it does; whether it really does it is left as an exercise for the GM):

• anonymizes or never gets location info
• offers the choice of really deleting exchanges or, like SnapChat, deletes them after a certain period of time
• encrypts data that's transmitted or saved, so if someone makes a copy of your phone somehow, they don't have a way to read your info. (I leave actual details to someone with expertise, but I'm thinking of a key that's stored somewhere and everything is encrypted in a new way after each look, though the transmission of the key might be vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack
• does not translate but handles multiple language code sets
• provides a list of enrolled supers, so if you've never met Fantastica you can still send him/her/it a message.

Problem 2: How are people verified?

Given that the supers population is limited, this might actually be a use for blockchain algorithms. My tentative answer is that some other user verifies you. So you can *get* the app off iTunes or the Google store or whatever the equivalent is, but you can't *use* the app until you're verified.

There might be a second app for getting in touch with heroes, but I think it would be like looking at a celebrity's Instagram: every fifth entry is "I love you so much! Please answer this!"

Kid Heroes

SYSTEM: Any

Just finished the first collected volume of Super Sons and I enjoyed it. It strikes me as an interesting idea for a limited roleplaying campaign, too: players are children of established heroes. Unlike, say, a Teen Titans or Young Avengers-style game, part of it is that the parents will get involved.

I wouldn't use it for play with actual kids; my theory is that kids want to be adults in their games, even if they make kid-like choices. (My son never wanted actual conflict when he was a toddler, and the assumption always seemed to be that there was someone he could go to who would solve the problem.) But every kid is different; be guided by the kid involved.

Anyway, the premise is that, because the parents work together in some way, the kids will be thrown together. One of them should probably be an instigator, somebody who can get them into trouble or investigate adventures.

Because they're not necessarily an established group, the adventures probably substitute a "Getting the band together" sequence for the hook or threat. Again, you don't want to have to try to convince the other players often (that's one reason this would be limited run) but once in a while, it's nice.

The central problems (and I'm not one of those writers who starts with the meaning it symbolizes) could mostly be "children" of issues that the adult heroes have dealt with. If you're making up the adults as well, then you just have little capsule statements of what the original problem was. (The first five issues of Super Sons deals with a side effect of the Amazo virus. "One man Justice League" is the description given of Amazo, the virus gets two panels.)

If you do work off the underlying meaning, then you'll have to think about what you're trying to accomplish with the adventure. The parents can then provide what Algis Budrys used to call the vindication at the end of the story.

Side note: I am moving away from the idea that you have to have a theme in the sense that you want to prove a certain thing, like "X is bad" or "Y is good". Instead, for roleplaying purposes, "theme" seems more like defining the handball court you're going to play in. The situations show good or bad but you don't make a statement, just like you don't dictate how the players are going to solve the problem. You make sure there's at least one solution, you provide lots of different things they can use to generate a solution, and you think about generally three avenues:

• They beat up the bad guy
• They defeat the bad guy in some way that doesn't involve beating up
• They don't win against the bad guy

And when I digress like this, as KARTAS listeners know, it's time to end this.

Stamina Success Pyramids in ICONS

SYSTEM: ICONS

Originally posted December 4, 2013, over on the old Dreamwidth account. Preserved mostly because I liked the characters in the example.

(Can we get any more specific?)

One of the optional rules in ICONS Team-Up is that characters can use success pyramids instead of Stamina. That is, instead of saying that a given character has 15 Stamina, you say that he needs a Massive Success to knock out.

Quick recap of terms: A Massive Success means that you get 5 or more points of Effort (that is, your roll and numbers add up to 5 or more better than the target difficulty, whatever it is: a roll+Ability of -1+8=7 is a Massive Success if the difficulty is 2, but not if the difficulty is 10). The thing that makes this a pyramid is that the successes are cumulative: two moderate successes make a major success, and two major successes make a massive success (which means that four moderate successes total up to a massive success).

In some ways, this is the same as Stamina, except that you're not whittling down Stamina points, you're whittling down even more abstract Success Pyramid points or levels. But that very abstraction opens you up to some different possibilities.

Those successes can be in anything. Suppose your heroes are fighting the evil Regenatron ("The Von Neumann New Man"), with Regeneration 10 and Damage Resistance 8, but only Intellect 3.

Aaaaand the powerhouse character (Strength 10!) player didn't show up the last mnute. What you have instead are Looneytunes the shapeshifter and Bob Howard The Duck, the computer-using occultist who has been cursed into the form of an anthropomorphic metrosexual duck.

With a success pyramid, they could take on Regenatron.

Rather than punching (Looneytunes is Strength 3; Bob Howard The Duck, henceforth BHTD, is Strength 1 because, hey, he's a duck), they confuse him into giving up.

Looneytunes begins by working with BHTD to create a dinner date, and Looneytunes assumes the form of an attractive female rabbit. (Well, it works for Bugs Bunny.) Their first scam is to make it think that he's the odd one for not being an anthropomorphic animal....and they get a major success, because it's not bright. They tell it it's supposed to be a sloth. (The GM adds "Gullible" to his list of challenges for Regenatron, and makes a note that a firmware upgrade will remove that later.)

Then they fake it out by claiming it has to go to the office, which it does, trying very hard to stunt its regeneration into transformation, trying to look like a sloth, and it's moving slowly. It's taken in by the office (moderate success), which is why the explosive in the filing cabinet surprises it. (Looneytunes' cosmic power whipped it up.)

Then Looneytunes comes in as Regenatron's "boss" and begins berating it, but Regenatron figures out who he really is (the poor shapeshifter has a tell), and gets mad (the GM is using the rule where a failure wipes out an equivalent success). Regenatron is angry, so it doesn't see the portable hole that BHTD has conjured up and steps in....and the hole leads to the other hole in the ceiling, so poor Regenatron keeps falling faster and faster, while Looneytunes gives it anvils to hold and gets popcorn while eating, right up until BHTD takes the hole out of the floor...

And so on. It rather reminds me of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game in that abstraction (though the idea predates that game).

If you were going to use success pyramids for stamina, I'd consider only using them for villains, or major villains.

Though...in a sense, the minion rule in ICONS is kind of a success anthill: minions are removed from the fight by a single success. You could grade opposition by success pyramids...

Opposition	To Defeat	Possible Difficulty
Minion	A single moderate success	To hit value
Henchman	Major success	To hit value
Villain	Massive success	5, but depends on hero tactics
Megavillain	Massive success	8, but depends on hero tactics
Cosmic crossover style villain	Massive success	10, but depends on hero tactics

What it takes away is any concrete idea of what the heck they're doing, and the level of the power matters less.

What it adds is that villains who would normally be invulnerable are now accessible by all sorts of means.

Strength and the ICONS benchmarks

SYSTEM: ICONS

I went looking for this information because I was sure I had put it here, transported from my old LiveJournal account.

I had not. I looked up the numbers in 2013, and can no longer remember what, specifically, they represented. So this is ballpark only.

If you're playing ICONS, you're not really concerned with hard numbers, but I played Champions for years and years... So I went and dug up things that the Strength benchmark lists as an example. And these numbers make it easier to eyeball conversions from other systems.

In the spirit of casualness, I always rounded up (I mean, I have a heavy sack as 20 kg, and a couple of heavy sacks as 50 kg). Still, I figured folks might like the numbers. (ICONS does not necessarily map to the real world; it's not meant to. This is so you can make judgements on the fly.)

Some of it is just, what? Weight of a building—what kind of building? Since superhero stories generally take place in New York or a New York analogue, I used the weight bandied about for one of the World Trade Center buildings. Since the next entry is 2x107 bigger, I think that works.

Again: I have no idea if these numbers are even in the one significant figure accuracy, but hey...

Rank	Example	Mass (kg)	Comments
1	Heavy sack	20	Yes, kilograms. I'm Canadian.
2	Child	35
3	Couple of heavy sacks	50
4	Adult man	100
5	Motorcycle	200
6	Car	2000	These days, cars are much lighter than they used to be. But I used the old weight.
7	Tank	60000	I think I looked up the weight of an M1 Abrams for this.
8	Plane or train	5E5 (500 tons)	A fully-loaded freight train weighs much more than a passenger jet. I think I went with a train here. A Cessna would be vastly lighter and qualify as a plane, but you know that's not what they're talking about.
9	Building	5E8 (500 kilotons)	Empire State Building? Football stadium? Big, anyway.
10	Mountain	1E16 (Lots. A hundred million kilotons.)

The Minion Escape

SYSTEM: ICONS

Generally applicable to Superhero games, but I'm using ICONS as an example. I'm also going to assume that the heroes involved don't have reputations as killers: your minion has a different approach facing the Elongated Man than facing the Punisher.

So the heroes stumble into the bad guy's minions, and there's a fight. Maybe the heroes knock them all out, but maybe there's a point in the middle of the six minions to two heroes battle when two minions have already fallen, but the rest are still up.

It'll depend on circumstances, but why don't the minions flee?

I mean, sure, if each minion has the Quality "Fanatically Loyal to SKULL" then they fight to unconsciousness, but most minions aren't fanatically loyal...that's part of the reason they're minions. The villain went down to Thugs'R'Us and ordered a half-dozen, or something.

Do you have to fight until you defeat all the minions, every time?

Well, when I put it that way, no, of course not.

Again, circumstances: sometimes the minions have to go through the heroes to get out, so they're fighting instead of fleeing. But normally, why don't they try to run away after the battle turns against them?

Heck, why don't they try to flee as soon as the heroes show up? Maybe the villain has planned for it: "I want you four to steal the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator, but if the Great Gang shows up, just cheese it. Make sure the Security Code Generator doesn't get caught—flush it down a toilet if you have to." Maybe not.

If you want a mechanical way to do it (and I don't recommend that, because it's just minion-on-minion action), roll Willpower against the number of heroes, with each additional minion being added like combining effort. If the minion succeeds, well, fear of the boss has won over good sense and the minion stays to fight. Minion qualities can add or subtract 2 to the roll.

Or roll your D6: A 1 is fleeing. As minions get taken down, that fleeing number gets higher. When 1 minion is taken down, the minion flees on a 1 or a 2. When 2 get taken down, the remaining minions flee on a 1, 2, or 3. When more get taken down, minions flee on a 1 through 4. At some point, the remaining minion just wants to leave or hide or surrender.

Your fled minion might be a source of future events. Maybe the minion gave the information to the boss, but maybe not. Maybe the minion hid until the boss was caught. Maybe the minion joined an opposing gang. Maybe the minion started a course, "Escaping from heroes," that's taught at the Annex (under a different name). Maybe the minion was scared straight. Or maybe the minion starts an anti-supers campaign against both heroes and villains because normal people shouldn't have to put up with such fear.

Tom King's Batman...some early thoughts

SYSTEM: Any

Early for me, of course. I've been reading the comic for all of four issues; I hadn't read much of Morrison's run, nor any of Snyder's run, for financial reasons. But there was all this buzz about the Superman/Batman issues, and I'm in a slightly better state (enough that I can plunk down $10 Canadian a month for comics), so I got myself a subscription. Now I've read issues 36-39, and three of those are titled as the same story arc ("Superfriends").

So these are early impressions about what might be an atypical quartet of issues...and maybe some connections to superhero roleplaying.

And yeah, there are spoilers here. I'm not trying to avoid them.

First of all, though fights happen in every issue, they're incidental to the story. Actually fighting with Double-X takes up, what, four panels? There's a fair amount of beating-people-up in issues 36 and 39, but there's no suspense about how it's going to turn out. If Batman gets in a fight, the bad guys lose. Heck, he even competes against Superman in issue 37, (although in that case, there's some doubt as to who will win).

I feel kind of odd about that. I yearned for it to happen in a superhero comic, and now I feel kind of conflicted that it has happened. (Actually, Astro City at least got there first. But this is Batman, and it's not what I expect from Batman, or expect only, say, 10% of the time.)

The current issue (with Wonder Woman, continuing the Super-Friends storyline) certainly also sees a lot of fighting and it's necessary to the setting but the story being told involves them winning the fight. (Well, "winning" is probably the wrong word.)

(Actually, the mechanics of it confuse me. The fighting dimension is the gateway to our world, but it can only be opened from our world. So why not leave it to the bad guys? It's possible to open from that side but we don't know how? It might be possible, and if they take over the dimension, they'll have a long, long time to figure it out? Not quite sure.)

So far, though, it's an interesting enough ride to keep on. The single issue story ("The Origin of Bruce Wayne") was creepy enough and certainly plays on all the, well, creepy parts of the Batman mythology, as well as reflecting on Bruce Wayne's part of the story. To me it seems clear that Batman and Bruce are equal parts of the character here, even though we haven't officially seen much Bruce stuff.

Interesting reads, anyway. I'll stick with it until the Annual, anyway. We'll see if the marriage actually happens.